Electrical circuit simulation is a part of an overall electronic design automation (EDA) process in which a computer system and/or processor simulates the operation of the circuit being designed. The simulation can be used to evaluate the performance of the circuit, such as operating ranges and noise tolerance. Electrical circuit simulation may also be used to evaluate the reliability of the circuit in the face of long-term (aging) effects of transistors on the time scales of, for example, thousands to millions of seconds of operating time.
However, comparative techniques for simulating the long term effects are typically very time consuming (often taking more than ten hours to run on current hardware) and computationally expensive using simulation tools such as Simulation Program with Integrated Circuit Emphasis (SPICE). Furthermore, aging effects are simulated through data post-processing steps, where the parameters of the transistors are modified in accordance with their aging, and another full simulation of the now aged circuit is performed.
In addition, making minor changes to the circuit design, such as changes to the inputs to the circuit or changes to transistor parameters, requires full re-simulation of the entire circuit, thereby incurring significant costs and discouraging the use of simulation to experiment with design changes and to perform feasibility studies.